


it won't be the last

by tyah



Category: Runaways (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Flashbacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-23 23:56:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20016886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyah/pseuds/tyah
Summary: Season 1 and 2 moments between Gert and Chase





	it won't be the last

“The idea sounded better in my head,” Chase whispers as to not wake everybody else up. Alex is by his feet next to Nico and Karolina is on the opposite of the tent. Molly demanded her own tent and since it was her birthday, they all agreed. They were all camped out in the Yorkes’ backyard under the stars, which Chase had been psyched to see.

Molly’s ninth birthday would almost be over in a matter of hours, but she wanted to stay up, they ended up making a game out of it. Who could stay up the longest? They all had been going on pretty strong until it hit midnight and they all started dropping like flies.

“I’m pretty sure you say that every time you have an idea,” Gert replies, muttering under her breath and it’s supposed to be a beratement but there’s a smile on her lips as she says it. Her body facing out, next to him. He turns his head, his sleeping bag, which is squashed up next to hers, rustles over the grass and he makes a face at her.

They’re the only ones still awake.

“Hey,” Chase tries to keep his voice quiet to spare everyone the noise. He doubts that Nico or Alex wouldn’t take too kindly to be being woken up but their conversation. “I have a good one now and then.”

He suggested that the lookup and see how many constellations they could find; the top of the tent has some sort of a plastic mesh that’s transparent enough for them to see through.

“Yeah…the pollution from all the city lights killed this one. Not to mention how badly the artificial lights affect bird migration patterns, like millions of them every year go off course or collide with buildings and die because our insane need to have a LED billboard on every corner,” Gert says. He notices the volume isn’t as loud as it usually is when she gets like this, but her brows still draw together when she speaks. “The only place we’d be able to see stars in the desert.”

“Well, that sucks,” He replies slowly, and she blinks at him, looking unimpressed. “For the birds, I mean obviously,” Chase says quickly. “I can see the stars from my house.”

“With your telescope?”

“Yeah, my dad’s actually. I bet if we went up on the roof one night, we could see the stars.” He settles on his back again and relaxes his face. “Do you ever wonder what it’s like up there. To see it and feel it for yourself.”

“Space?” She glances at him then and her eyes look smaller because she’s not wearing her glasses. She brushes her dark hair back from her face and he watches, her before she resumes looking up at the night sky again. “I don’t know. I think all that vastness would make me lose it.”

“Yeah. It’s kind of crazy, how endless it is. I want to…” he trails off, words lost in the air between his lips, but she presses him.

“You want to what?”

“Go up on the roof one night. I’d a really good excuse though or maybe just a lookout,” He says carefully like he doesn’t need one and could still do it anyway, but Gert sees him bite his lip and knows exactly what to say.

“I could do it.”

“You would?”

“Yeah,” Gert looks away from the tent ceiling and glances at him. “I would.”

* * *

“How did this even happen?” Gert asks as she picks the broken glass out of Chase’s wounds.

She and Karolina snuck into his house. Gert still knew how to get inside, remembering the trick with the lock.

It had only been more or less twelve months since the last time Gert had been here. It hadn’t changed much except for all the championship lacrosse trophies lining his shelves, and the stack of weights neat and ordered at the far side of his desk. She could see pieces of the old Chase in here, their old life in fragments. With everything that was happening and now being here was dredging up too many old feelings.

“My dad shot me with the fistagons,” Chase confesses.

“What?” Her voice comes out harsher than planned and stops cleaning his wounds. “Is he insane? He could have killed you-”

“It’s not his fault. He’s not doing well.” He argues and turns his neck flinching slightly from the soreness.

She wipes the drying blood stains from his skin and scoffs at his words. She never understood the hold his father had over him.

“He blasted his son through a freakin’ glass window, so I think that’s a gross understatement.”

“It wasn’t his fault, there’s something wrong. I shouldn’t have been in his lab in the first place,” Chase says firmly and finally makes eye contact with her. She looks worried, the crease between her eyebrows gave her away every time something he always remembered. He lowers his voice, “I don’t even know why I thought it would be different this time.”

Gert finishes retrieving all the broken glass and moves away from the bed to throw it in the trash. She turns back to face him, resting her back on his dresser and doesn’t seem as frazzled as he was when he first came in but there’s still a tenseness that hangs over the room.

“Just whatever I want to forget this tonight ever happened.” He says picking up his shirt and put it on. “I’m glad you came. I uh tried to call.”

“Yeah, I got the notification,” Gert tells him. Even after all the whirlwind revelations over the past few hours, the fact that he called her first is still a standout.

He walks over to where she is and sits next to her. “How many people signed that petition, by the way?”

“Oh god, I forgot all about that voicemail.” She touches her forehead absentmindedly and catches him grinning at her. “Hey, I’ll have you know that I was able to raise a lot of awareness about the child labour laws in LEDCs.”

“I’m not surprised. You were always good at that stuff.”

It’s quiet then, the two of them sharing the silence looking into each other’s eyes when Gert breaks his charged stare.

“Ah, I gotta clean this stuff off me.” She springs up suddenly and dusts herself off.

He stands up too, pointing behind him. “Of course, yeah, the bathroom’s just through there.”

“Yeah, yeah I remember. Thanks,” She shuffles past, almost bumping into him on her way out.

* * *

Officially they’ve been on the run for a day and a half, but it feels like it’s been much longer with the way every muscle in her body aches that along with her stomach being filled with only a watered-down, tomato soup doesn’t have Gert feeling so good. The whole group knew that she didn’t have her anxiety meds either and her plan, for now, was to hold it together, that she was capable of holding it together especially for Molly.

However, that was until they had been confronted by a literal dead body, someone that was so important to her sister, the last living relative she had. With the last connection she had to her birth parents was ruthlessly stolen from her and all Gert could manage was to stand there stuck, she felt like she trapped in her head. For the first time, words failed her, and she couldn’t comfort Molly. She was thankful that Chase and Nico had stepped up, offering comfort and an oddly poetic Wiccan-inspired funeral to help somewhat.

Getting ready to sleep under a freeway underpass amongst the homeless community by the LA river seems like one of the more normal activities that they’ve participated in compared to attempting to take down their murderous parents or aliens who can weaponize light energy that could obliterate them in under five seconds. Not to mention the further away they ventured from familiar surroundings the higher the chance they could come across something or someone else more unsavoury.

Their faces were plastered all over the news and every correspondent from every local media outlet was demanding for their heads.

What if they got caught?

The police were on their parents’ payroll too. They could end up in prison or worse.

“Do you need help with that?” Chase asks his voice cuts through the darkness of the small tent they occupy.

She glances up from her hands, previously fussing with one of the sleeping bags that Alex had bought to get them. Gert didn’t know how he managed to score them since he was being so secretive as of late, which didn’t help either

She took a deep breath before answering. “Why would you ask me that? What? Just because I’m a girl I must surely require a boy to assemble a piece of camping equipment. God forbid that I actually know how to do something independently!”

“Whoa slow down,” Chase is in front of her and has already set up his own sleeping bag for the night. It lies at his feet perfectly at his feet. “I uh I-I’m sure that you’re fully capable-”

“Then what is it?” she snapped.

“It’s a…it’s inside out,” he tells her reluctantly. Gert looks down and sees that he is, in fact, right about the sleeping bag, in all her worrying Gert hadn’t noticed that she had twisted up the neon yellow and blue polyester. 

“Oh,” She gasps a little when she finally opens her mouth. He has that kicked puppy look on his face and it makes her feel even more terrible. She had been short with him for most of the day and their conversation at the dig site played through her mind. She had pushed him away before he could have the chance to do it himself as she knew would once he got the chance and that thought was too much to bear. “Right.”

“Yeah…I guess I will leave you to it.” Chase says, biting his lip. He looks like he was going to say something else but thinks better of it and starts taking his shoes off, so he can get into his own sleeping bag.

She sets out to fix the problem and them flattens out the bag on the small space. Gert shuts her eyes tight and fidgets while Chase settles on his back.

“I’m sorry.” Gert apologises, and he looks her way. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you. You were only trying to help, and I haven’t been exactly been…accommodating.”

“It’s okay. I’d say it’s been a rough couple of days but that would be an understatement.”

“Yeah,” Gert exhales and the small puffs of air that leave her mouth cause her hair to flutter. She slipped into her sleeping bag and tried to close it and this day would be over, her mind could rest for at least a few hours. Unfortunately, it seemed like her sleeping bag had other plans. The zipper wouldn’t budge from its position at the bottom for it to close properly. She must have damaged it when she was going through the worst-case scenarios in her head.

“Great.” She huffs but attempts to settle in any way.

“What’s the matter?”

“My sleeping bag won’t close. I must have… I must have damaged the zipper earlier. It’s fine. I’m not that cold.”

“Oh well, we can share mine if you want.”

She turns her neck so her face rests against the polyester. “Are you sure about that?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” He simply rolls his eyes and doesn’t let his mind travel there. Besides, they really did need to get some rest. Nothing was going to happen; he was convinced she still hated him anyway. “I’m cold too, come here.”

That’s helpful, she thinks. Combining their body heat to stay warm makes sense, they wouldn’t be of any use to the group if they both got sick. Gert scoots over as he opens the sleeping bag, so she can slip inside next to him. He zips it up to where there’s enough room so they can lie face to face, his arms were kind of trapped loosely around her waist.

“Is this okay?” Chase asks nervously. “If not, I can turn around. This sleeping bag is a lot smaller than I thought. You can have-”

“No, no it's fine. This is fine,” Gert assures, glancing up at him and begins to smile. “And I think turning around would kind of defeat the point of keeping each other warm.”

“Right” He laughs, and they lock eyes, outside movements of shadow pass across the wall of the tent. They might be trying to get some sleep but their neighbours for the night were livelier than they had all anticipated. Once every few seconds, Chase could see outlines of figures walk by their tent and instinctively wraps an arm tighter around Gert. “I guess this is the least of our worries at this point.”

“I’m trying to avoid thinking of worst-case scenarios,” Gert says.

“We can talk about something else if you want.” He replies at the same time her stomach rumbles loudly and she tenses.

“PRIDE soup isn’t as filling as they make them out to be.” Chase jokes his tone even but then perks up. “Hey, do you remember Home Ec in the eighth grade and we had to pair up to make a dish. You said we were making tacos or nothing else-”

Gert moves out of her hunched position against his chest, lifting her neck and when he looks down, he sees her smiling at him. “Uh, I said you could be in charge of cutting the chilli peppers… I didn’t think that you would end up having to go to the nurse and flush your eyes out.” She laughs at the memory, it seemed like it was so long ago. 

“Nurse Wilson was always so mean.”

“Are saying that only because she’s a woman in place of authority?”

“No.”

“Good, because she terrifies me too.” She admits making them both laugh.

He gently pushes her hair out of her face, laughing along with her. “I may have gotten a little impatient.”

“Sticking your face in a bowl of salsa was not going to speed up the cooking process.” One of his hands settles on her lower back, his thumb brushes over the denim and warms her skin. She hopes he doesn’t move away too soon.

“We made it out of that okay, didn’t we?”

He hopes that could quell her nerves and holds back a sigh when it doesn’t.

“Those are fake, just someone else’s memories. That’s not our life anymore, Chase.”

He swallows audibly. He knew that but hearing it aloud was something different. 

So, he doesn’t anything more but keeps a tight hold instead.

* * *

“I’m sorry that I couldn’t train again with you guys today.” Gert apologises as she helps Nico clear up the impromptu training area they had set up in the foyer of the mansion. This time around they had a full team in house and since getting Alex back from his parents they decided that they needed to up their game.

True to form, Alex was making sure that their home was secure by rigging up some old webcams that he had turned into a security system. Karolina and Molly were much further along than the rest of, but Gert was still worried that she might try sneaking out again and going all superhero vigilante. She had already brought another runaway, Topher, home who nobody trusted at all.

“Gert, stop apologising,” Nico says, picking up one of the makeshift dummies they had made and putting it back to its upright position. Her mouth was turned down and eyes narrowed which was making Gert think that she was pissed at her, although that could just be her face. Seemingly pissed was Nico Minoru’s default setting.

Gert hurries over to clear up the last remaining targets. Making herself useful is good; it proves to them that she’s still an asset to this team. It also meant that she could avoid going upstairs for another few minutes. Hopefully, by the time she returns to their room Chase will be fast asleep.

However, Nico brushes her off again, determined to finish this up herself.

“Are you sure you don’t need any help with that?” Gert asks

“No. I’m fine,” Nico promises but takes a second to regard her. “Are you?”

“Yep, yep. I’m cool.”

“Yeah sounds convincing. Where’s Chase?”

“Last time I checked he was trying to get us a working shower,” Gert says with a pause. “Actually, it’s been a while I should probably go check and see where he’s at.”

Gert takes the steps one at a time until she reaches the second floor. The door to their room is open slightly and Old Lace rests little ways down outside their space. She stops short at the door and crouches down to stroke her head, the cool scales that cover the top of the dinosaur’s head and snout.

“Hey, I thought you would be asleep by now. What is the daily recommended sleep allowance for warm-blooded reptiles?” Gert whispers and Old Lace blinks in reply. “You wanna come in here with me and find out from Chase what we possibly could need from freakin’ Eiffel of all people, that’d be great. You can be the bad cop?” She smiles when Old Lace settles down on the pillow once more and her breathing evens out.

“Ugh, what is wrong with me?”

When Lace crashes out finally, she stands and enters the bedroom to see Chase where she expected him to be. It’s different sharing space with and a bed with him for that matter. She was accustomed to sometimes Molly coming into her bedroom when they were younger in response to having a nightmare, she would crawl under the covers, they’d link arms, Gert would sing her a lullaby and she’d sleep soundly for the rest of the night.

It was different with Chase. He didn’t mind that she tended to steal the covers but that was only because she swore, he radiated so much heat at night, it was like sleeping beside a furnace. He really liked sleeping in and would always pull her back into bed, promising he only needed five more minutes in bed with her. Chase Stein was a surprisingly cuddly sleeper. There hadn’t been any lullaby’s, but he always listened when she talked.

Sometimes she wondered why he put it with it, he was Chase and she was broken.

She pushes the bedroom door open as quietly as she can manage but the mansion is old and gives her away with an eerie, unnerving creek. Gert looks over her shoulder at the mattress they call a bed and Chase stirs, flopping over onto his stomach. She breathes a sigh of relief when he doesn’t move again before changing into something that she can sleep in.

Gert slips under the covers beside him and lies stiffly on her back, it doesn’t take too much time for him to migrate over to her.

His eyes flutter open slowly, the creases in his forehead even out when he finally wakes. “Hey,”

“Sorry,” she frowns but he only moves closer, seeking out warm and finding it in the fleshy part of her upper arm. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“S’okay,” he mumbles sleepily at the same time he tries to close his eyes again. “Good news tomorrow we might have a working shower.”

One of her hands falls on his lower back and her head tilts at that piece of information. “How’d you manage to pull that off?”

“Started looking at the pipes when we got back, found a water metre unlocked not too far from here. I think I can do it.” Chase tells her quietly and then snorts like he’s found something funny. “Apparently, Topher knows a guy who knows a guy who has a final part I need but seems legit.”

“That’s...that is good news.” Gert agrees, albeit distractedly while she rubbed his back. She was still thinking about everything that happened at Atlas Academy. How the hell did Topher get those cars anyway? She was glad that Molly had found something she treasured since they practically crash-landed in this dump, but she was still cautious, even if she didn’t have her medication. Her attempt to retrieve her meds from the school dispensary had been a bust too. It felt like she couldn’t function and running into Eiffel of all people was the icing on the cake. Why was she in the bathroom with Chase?

Why did she campaign so hard for that gender-neutral bathroom?

“Yeah, gone are the days where we smell like something Old Lace would fish out of a dumpster.” He jokes.

“Uh-huh,”

“Hey. What’s wrong?” he’d moved from his position at her side and propped himself up on one elbow, so he hovered over her. “Are you having one of those headaches again? If it helps then-”

“No, nothing like that I’m fine.” Gert shakes her head dismissively. She didn’t see how voicing it would help now.

His eyes scan her face and he hesitated before speaking. These days he felt like he was always said the wrong thing when it came to her “Gert, I know it’s been rough, especially these past few days but you got through it even with your anxiety. You’re a lot stronger than you think and I’m here if you need anything. In the supportive boyfriend way not in the archaic, tropey white knight way,” he finishes quickly remembering one of her many complaints about those issues.

She gives him a small smile in return. “I got that vibe, but the clarification is appreciated.”

He smiles and drops his neck forward so his forehead rests on top of her own. “Thank you.” She tells him. “But I suck.”

“What?” Chase pulls back slightly and scoffs. “No, you don’t.”

Gert brings her palm to her face and closes her eyes. She can’t even look at him, here he was being all sweet and she let Eiffel make her feel all insecure over nothing. “Oh, but I do.”

“Stop. Hey, would you-” Chase huffs when she doesn’t remove her hands from her face. He wraps his fingers around her wrists, and she grumbles but lets him take her hands away from her face so she can see him again. 

“What are you talking about?” he asks.

“It’s just… back at school when you came out of the gender-neutral bathroom back at Atlas and you were with Eiffel-”

“But nothing happened.” Chase squints. He doubts she’d even stand to be in the same room as him if she did actually think that, but he was still confused.

“I know, I know that,” Gert reassures, sitting up in the bed. “I was being insecure, and stupid and I am so sorry, I feel awful.” She stares at him, waiting for a response. “Well, say something.”

It feels like she’d been waiting for forever but then his top lip quirks upwards. “So, you were jealous?”

“Chase!” She shoves him with her open palm on the bicep, but it doesn’t move him an inch. Before going on the run one the most important things to Chase was his gym schedule. “Shut up, it’s not funny and as I’m going through withdrawal from my meds it's not exactly helpful.”

“I’m sorry I-” He gasps for air as he tries to stop the giggling. He tries to get some control over his voice. “You were jealous of Eiffel?”

“For like a millisecond,” Gert admits, shaking her head. “I was more suspicious of her than anything else.”

“She’s horrible. You said it yourself she’s a hateful bitch.” Out of all the things they had to worry about she was nowhere on the list.

He couldn’t say that she had exactly changed, the girl was still as vapid as ever, but she did help them when they were vulnerable.

“Well yeah, I said that she was a hateful bitch.” Gert falls back onto the mattress and twists the edges of the blanket in between her fingers. “But you hung out with her for a whole year and I don’t know,” Gert hates how small her voice sounded in this moment, it makes her thankful that the lights weren’t turned on. “She doesn’t need pills to regulate her serotonin levels.”

He flops onto his side and takes her face into his hand so she’s looking into his eyes and not at the ceiling. He’d very much prefer it if Gert was looking at him when he tells her this and not the Danny DeVito-Acorn hybrid mould stain all the way up there.

“Okay, but she wouldn’t care if I told her about the latest post on Wired and she doesn’t get excited about old ass poetry that I’ve never heard of before and then give me a biography on who wrote it, and I love how passionate you get about so many different things,” Chase knows Gert doesn’t take compliments well, her cheek feels unusually warm underneath his fingers and she’s probably embarrassed but he hopes she hears him. Even as their world was falling apart, he thinks at any moment he could blurt out that he was in love with her. “I know all of this is hard to process without your medication, but I was serious about what I said when we found this place. We’re going to get through this together.”

If it wasn’t for his hand on her cheek, she definitely would have broken the gaze much earlier after he finished that little speech.

It takes a moment her a moment to speak, but he’s glad when she finally does. “Okay.”

“Yeah?” Chase smiles.

She nods and then raises her a finger to her lips. The sign letting him know that it was okay, and he smiles into the kiss because of it.

It starts slow, but Chase holds her face in his hands and Gert follows up the first kiss with another and it quickly escalates when she grips him by the neck, pulling his body so she falls back onto the mattress.

She moans into his mouth when his tongue edges in, tracing the seam of her lips and they share a breath. He tries to keep steady but feels himself starting to get lost in her touch. Her hands roam down his back, pushing up the bottom of his t-shirt to touch his bare skin.

All their kisses up until this moment had been sweet and chaste. Sex wasn’t exactly high on their list of priorities as much as staying alive was and securing food and shelter. But the only thing on Gert’s mind is how can she get closer to him, and the way he touched her. She had missed this. When his pelvis falls between her thighs and he starts grinding against her she swears she can see stars behind her eyes.

Her hands are still under his shirt but within a few seconds, Chase pulls it over his head. She whimpers a little at the loss of his lips not moving over hers but its suddenly forgotten when he goes back in for another. It seems like they are there in the dark, kissing and grinding for a while until her hand slips down to his abdomen and he jumps.

He didn’t mean for it to get this far. Gert had voiced her thoughts about this to him not too long along ago. Chase didn’t want her to think he was pressuring her into anything.

Chase slows down and stills her hands. “Um, Gert maybe we should slow down,” he says but his voice is hardly convincing with the gruffness of its tone.

“Why?” She asks him, hands low on his stomach. She can feel the tight muscles twitch beneath her hands and looks him in the eyes. “Oh, do you not want to?”

“I thought-I just thought that you didn’t want to do…that right now.”

She sighs, it was wrong of her to assume that he would just because she was ready now. “Only if you want to, it’s totally okay if-”

“No! I do.” He responds much faster than she had anticipated, it makes her bit her lip to stop the laughter.

“Oh, you do?” she raises an eyebrow.

He answers by capturing her lips in a searing kiss. It’s clumsy and graceless the way they shimmy out of the rest of their clothes but neither of them can keep the smile off their face any time they lock eyes. His lips glide across her cheek, neck and all the way down her sternum.

“This okay?” He asks with his mouth on her bare stomach. Gert nods to let him know that it is, it’s completely welcome. If she opened, her mouth she’d 100 per cent embarrass herself even further and would never live it down. 

He holds her hips in hands, stroking her skin. Back at the dance, the pair of them were high on adrenaline, excitement and ‘we stopped being fucking stupid and are finally doing this thanks to the end of the world vibes.’

“Wait. I’ll be right back.” He hops out of the bed and hurries over to the stack of boxes they kept at the corner of the room near his backpack and some random boxes. He rummages around the bottom of his bag until he finds his wallet, it wasn’t any use now, no dollar bills were lining the leather but luckily at this moment, there was a condom. 

“Chase! Where are you going?” She sits up and holds the blanket to cover herself and then giggles uncontrollably at what she sees. “Oh my god.”

He runs back to the bed and covers her small body with his.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” She betrays her answer when she laughs again. Gert tries to cover it, burying the side of her face into the worn-down pillow but his lips are soft but insistent on her skin. He manages to coax a response out of her faster than she would ever publicly admit. “It’s just um your ass is really pale.”

“Hey, a pale ass that you’ve stared at for quite a while, baby,” Chase points out with sudden confidence gracing his features and her eyes widen from being called out. He missed teasing her like this. “Yeah, I noticed.”

She tries to keep her giggling at bay as he smoothers her neck with kisses, they could wake up the entire abandoned mansion and Nico will kill them when they inevitably traipse in late to next morning’s practice but at this moment it was refreshing to not have a care in the world. 

* * *

“But, speaking of bad ideas I'm sorry I didn't tell you about Smith. I was operating from a place of fear.” Gert apologises, she’s glad that they’re finally talking again and not just fighting.

It was hard

“I get it. And you're super smart. Scary passionate. And you want more out of life.” Chase says softly,

“But I want you to feel comfortable telling me things. Especially if we're a couple.”

“Can we, um can we just start over? Maybe figuring out what's wrong with Old Lace together?” Gert replies

“Yeah. I'd like that a lot.” Chase agrees, “We have kind of been wingin' it.”

“Well she doesn’t want to eat, she won’t drink. The best she could hold down was a handful of nuts and a 4-day-old waffle,” Gert fills him in while she strokes Old Lace’s snout. “A surprising combo but now all she does is toss and turn. I don’t think she’s slept at all.”

“So, you were the one who ate the last waffle, man I was looking forward to that.” Chase jokes moving to kneel in front of Old Lace whose eyelids are becoming droopy with each passing second.

“Let me try something.”

Chase leaves the room and comes back with a bowl of water and a rag. Het sets it down in front of them, dunking the rag in the water halfway until it’s damp enough and holds it against her face. Old Lace groans in relief and huffs, the warm breath tickles the air on his forearms. It doesn’t take much time for her to drift off to sleep.

“I spend all day with her and she’s fussy, but you spend two minutes with her and she’s out like a light. I don’t know how I feel about this.”

“Sometimes,” Chase pauses for a dramatic effect and places a hand on his chest. “They just want daddy.”

“No, don’t ever say that again,” she starts laughing, the chuckles bubbling up in her chest when he pouts and leans in to kiss her.

Gert smiles into it, happy they’re finally on good terms. When she pulls back a bout of dizziness hits her and he notices her clutch her head.

“Are you feeling okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, maybe a little woozy. I think I need to lay down for a minute.”

They lay on the mattress in silence, his front to her side in silence with him tracing invisible patterns on the fleshy part of her upper arm. The sunlight streaming in reflects of her hair and skin, almost giving off a warm glow, not the obvious multi-coloured alien way they were all still getting accustomed to but it one that made him feel safe and whole and loved.

He loved Gert. But he’d couldn’t say it so instead he tells her.

“I missed you.” His index finger makes a long loop by her elbow.

“I missed you too,” Gert turns on her side and uses her fist to prop her head up. “I never asked you if ever think about it?”

“Think about what?”

“The future,” Gert says almost wistful. “What could be after this?”

They stopped the earthquake and their parents seemed to have backed off. Maybe they could be normal teenagers for once and think

“I uh not really no. You’d be at college, Molly would probably-”

She stops him, shaking her head. “For you, Chase. What do you want?”

“I dunno I guess I never really thought about it,” Chase admits. “It’s not like I have a lot of options.”

“Are you serious?” Gert sits up so she’s looking down at him this time. “You could easily get into MIT with one of your inventions. You’re kind of a genius.”

He feels his face get hot and it doesn’t go unobserved by her. “Are you blushing?”

“No,” He reaches for her hand and laces their fingers together, holding them clasped in mid-air. He locks eyes with her again. “That sounds like a good plan.”

“Oh my gosh! Are you two back together?” They turn and spot Molly in the doorway. Her arms are filled with supplies for Old Lace presumedly.

Chase glances at her and then back to Gert. “Uh, yeah.”

“Great and just so we’re clear I gave the best advice.”

* * *

She feels the mattress dip and then he’s pulling her to him, but Gert weakly tries to fight him off. He’s able to wrap his arm around her shoulder and position them low enough on the bed to be comfortable.

Gert doesn’t remember much after blacking out. Old Lace was desperately sick now and no one knew what to do.

“No, I don’t wanna get you sick too.”

Chase scoffs and Gert watches him with glassy eyes. If she was feeling like her usual self, he was sure that she would have had a quick retort but all she could muster was a frown. She grumbles in pain and the sound wrenches his heart.

How did she get so sick so fast?

“You’re not gonna get me sick.” Chase says, “I’m pretty sure whatever’s happening is ‘cuz of the link you and Lace have. Unless you can read my mind, hm?”

Gert attempts to laugh ends with a garbled coughing sound. “Is it anywhere along the lines of how gross does my girlfriend sound right now?”

“Stop,” he leans in, planting his lips on her forehead. “You’re so far from gross.”

Gert reaches up and touches the side of his face. “Thank you.”

“You don’t have to thank me,” He says, thankful for this quiet moment between them but Gert groans again and clutches her stomach.

His forehead wrinkles in worry and moved to get up from the bed. “I’m gonna go get Molly. She might have figured something out.”

She tugs at his shirt before he can get too far. “Wait can you stay? Just until I fall asleep or pass out from the pain whichever one comes first, I guess.”

Gert offers him a feeble smirk but that’s all he needs.

“Sure.” He settles back in amongst the covers and wraps his arms around her for a second time.

Yeah, he loved Gert Yorkes. He was sure of it.


End file.
